Put Me in, Coach
My baseball playlist, Bernardine Evaristo on art & black women writers, a GBV "super-classics" playlist, an excerpt from Katy Simpson Smith’s new novel, and more
No other American sport embraces music like baseball. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” sung in the stands and at home during the seventh inning stretch, “Sweet Caroline” in Fenway Park, “New York, New York” at Yankee Stadium. So many songs across many genres immortalizing both the game and its stars.
Players walk to home plate (and the pitching mound) to their individualized hype music. What would be yours? I’d choose the opening bars of “Modern Kicks” by the Exploding Hearts to jumpstart the fans and my at-bat with a song not surprisingly also my wakeup music for years. What would your walk-up song be?
Below is some of my favorite music about the national pastime.
The Baseball Playlist:
Largehearted Likes
America Doesn’t Know Tofu
I had found it painful going vegan in college, giving up most of the foods that I loved. But after spending a summer in China, all that changed. I was now here on the pretense of “study abroad,” but really just crisscrossing the country to find foods that would excite me and other would-be vegans back in Los Angeles. I had to learn about the tofu dumpling of love.The Tate’s Look Again series of books
I picked up Bernardine Evaristo’s slim book Look Again: Feminism at work this week. The book’s focus on art by woman and non-binary artists drew me in, and Evaristo’s prose is both insighful and important. This series from London’s Tate museum on works by British artists over the past 500 years looks very promising.
Lydia Kiesling on the Showtime series Yellowjackets
When Kusama, who is also an executive producer, first met with Lyle and Nickerson to discuss the pilot, she likened it to a war story. She told me that the real wilderness of the show is “female interiority, female experience, female transformation and the presence of a kind of unchangeable chaos in women,” a delicious phrase.Grace Robins-Somerville’s newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife
I wanted to create an outlet where I could write in a loose structure about whatever music-related (or music-adjacent) topics are on my– and hopefully your –mind.Cherry Coke Zero
What wakes me up in the morning and keeps me going all day.Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s monthly list of new books
No other venue consistently introduces me to interesting books.
Javier Zamora on his memoir, Solito
I wanted the reader to feel the same thing that many immigrants feel, that sense of having strained for so long to cross a border and suddenly once you arrive, you’re like, “Wait, this is it? Was it really worth it?” I needed the reader to experience a similar shock.Aquarium Drunkard’s interview with John Leon of the instrumental band Royal Arctic Institute
Well, most of our stuff is pretty moody and low-key. I always get the images of liquid when I listen to our music. Do you remember those lava lamps that had different beautiful colors floating around slowly? I kind of imagine a sea of that. Lots of different shades of blues and purples and yellows.
Largehearted Links
Fluxblog’s “Guided By Voices Super-Classics” 132-song playlist
Bernardine Evaristo: 2023 Is A Breakthrough Year For Black British Women Novelists
Black women novelists move us from the position of passive spectators of other people’s stories to the centre of attention ourselves, either as protagonists or as the creators of fiction.
All Mixed Up: How the shuffle button came to define modern-day media consumption
Our social media timelines and YouTube feeds and video streaming services all employ the conceit, if not the science, of shuffle and randomness to keep us looking and listening, consuming without going through the work of figuring out what to consume.Book Riot explored books with music playlists
Increasingly, authors are beginning to post their own book-themed mixes online; as they try to connect with their readers across a variety of social media platforms. Publishing the music that inspired them is an engaging way of sharing their creative process.The members of boygenius on the critical reaction to their music
"When someone writes that this music fell out of me as a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, they completely erase all the deliberate, intentional craft I put into it.
TaraShea Nesbit on writing with movement and music
I’ve been moving about lately and noticing that certain kinds of writing lead me to want certain kinds of comfort. Comfort is a way of accessing motivation to write for me and big comfort helps me come closer to writing certain intimacies in whatever story I am working on.The Quietus profiled Colin Stetson
…by the time I was 18, I was listening to a lot of Squarepusher and Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura, and I was starting to think, ‘How does one emulate electronic music with a horn?’”Building a better brain through music, dance and poetry
In Your Brain on Art, Magsamen and Ross describe how a person's neural circuitry changes in response to activities like learning a new song, or a new dance step, or how to play a character onstage.An excerpt from Katy Simpson Smith’s novel The Weeds
Rome without you is muffled; a wash of absence coats the stones. You thought my grief would swallow me, but lover, I have taken an apprenticeship in color: I mark down what grows, making notes so a man in a waistcoat can make a green and ordered story.Stereogum on the 20th anniversary of the Exploding Hearts’ Guitar Romantic album
The Exploding Hearts weren’t the first band to contrast their wounded feelings with bright melodies and punchy instrumentation. But it’s hard to find another band having so much fun while breaking down all the ways their love lives suck.
Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s playlist for her novel Even As We Breathe
Belén Gopegui’s playlist for her novel Stay This Day and Night With Me
Casey Plett’s playlist for her story collection A Safe Girl to Love
Christine Hume’s playlist for her book Everything I Never Wanted to Know
Jennifer Banash’s playlist for her novel The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana
Katherine Factor’s playlist for her poetry collection A Sybil Society
Selena Chambers’s playlist for her book Babes in Toyland’s Fontanelle
Stacy Szymaszek’s playlist for her poetry collection Famous Hermits